farming

It’s farm bill season again. That’s right: time for our divided government to get together and reauthorize the five-year omnibus bill that affects everyone who grows, sells or eats food—or at least to go through the motions for a while before punting again like last year.

On a crisp winter morning, I took a walk in the sparkling snow covering our small farm. Soon four beehives beckoned.

Critics of the food movement's emphasis on organic, smaller-scale and local/regional agriculture tend to point out that feeding the world requires large-scale, conventional farming. But we're already producing more food than we need. The problem is drastic inequalities of access.

A new report from Oxfam (pdf) highlights one particularly egregious force behind these inequalities: foreign speculators buying up farmland in poor countries.

If agriculture survives at all on the Great Plains, it will be very limited. What will take its place? Not many people, that's for sure.

Joel Salatin's new book offers a full banquet of opinions, prescriptions and rants. How does the man find time to farm?

The developed world's negligence has produced one of Africa's cruelest ironies: its farmers are its hungriest people.

I'm as down on big organics as the next guy who makes homemade sauerkraut out of cabbage grown by his farmer wife. As Stephanie Strom details, the standards of organic certification could be much stronger, and most national organic brands are owned by the very mainstream companies they're standing in implicit objection to. Not exactly a recipe for systemwide reform.

Still, I think Tom Philpott's right: Michael Potter of the independent holdout Eden's Organics, Strom's primary focus, goes too far in slamming the certified-organic label as a "fraud."

The post office called recently about a box of honeybees. The assault of insecticides means my sister can no longer overwinter her hives.

There should be some kind of fanfare as the first seeds of a new season go in. But this sacred mundane act generally happens in silence.

Driving through a mini-snowstorm, I thought I might see a snowbow. But it never materialized--and once again, none of the snow stuck.

Something foul is brewing in the small-town Midwest, where I grew up:

A few years ago, hog farmers throughout the Midwest noticed foam building on top of their manure pits. Soon after, barns began exploding, killing thousands of hogs while farmers lost millions of dollars.

Wow, okay, so explosive pig-manure foam is a thing.

"We often have the idea of the feast appearing magically from the kitchen without labor. But the participatory aspect is the most important part of the feast."

America’s food production system is killing us. It relies on the use of fossil fuels, chemicals, growth hormones and antibiotics, and on production and farming practices that erode the soil and deplete the groundwater.An entirely different approach to food production can be glimpsed at Polyface Farm in central Virginia, where Joel Salatin’s Christian faith informs the way he farms and, to the best of his ability, honors the animals.